Don't Breathe When I Breathe

Don't Breathe When I Breathe
Lila was already turning them toward the shade. “Come on. I’m not asking.” She scanned the field with a witch’s eye for snakes and glass, found an old cedar stump, and hauled them that way. “Sit.”

“I can stand.” Morgan’s voice scraped.

“You can sit,” Lila corrected, already easing the Binder off Morgan’s shoulder with the same care she used with boiling sugar. “Two minutes. Then you can be a hero.”

Morgan didn’t have the breath to fight. She sat. The stump was sun-warmed and unforgiving; the bark dug into her thighs through denim. She planted her boots, braced the Binder across her lap with both hands, and stared at nothing.

Harper crouched in front of her, knees pressed to dirt. Up close, the graphite marks looked like riverbeds in drought—dark, sunburned, crusted at the edges where the skin around them had tried to swell and failed. They threaded past the elbow now, branching into fine tributaries that climbed under the sleeve. When the pulse hit, the lines didn’t throb. They clarified, the way a plan looks more certain when you draw it with a sharper pencil.

“Talk to me,” Harper said. “Not to it. To me.”

“I am.” Morgan aimed the words at Harper’s face and missed by an inch. “I’m here.”

“You’re not.” Harper swallowed and tried again. “You’re…half a foot to the left.”

Lila knelt on the other side and pulled a spool of black thread from her pocket, the cheap kind that snarls if you look at it wrong. She looped it twice around Morgan’s wrist above the scars, then tied a small knot like the start of a friendship bracelet. “I’m not sealing you,” she said, preempting the argument. “Just…outlining you.”

Morgan’s mouth twitched. “Annotating,” she rasped.

“Sure. You’re my favorite marginalia.” Lila’s hands didn’t shake as she tied a second knot, but her voice softened. “Every time I’ve done this on myself, I felt less floaty.”

Morgan stared at the thread. For the first time since the gorge, something like greed crossed her face—hungry for relief, not power. “It’s not a binding?”

“It’s a reminder.” Lila met her eyes, daring her to refuse kindness. “You’re the law. I’m only a girl with thread.”

Morgan let out a breath she’d been pretending not to hold and nodded.

They didn’t move for a minute. Heat shimmered just above the ditch water. A cricket decided it was time for punctuation and started sawing. A cloud, thin as onion skin, drifted across the sun and made the world briefly monochrome.

Her hands began to shake.

It was small at first, the tired tremor of someone who had carried too many grocery bags too far and just set them down. Then it gathered itself. The shake moved up her forearms, into her elbows, shoulders. Her teeth clicked once.

“Morgan—” Harper started, alarm up in her throat—

“I’m fine.” The words leapt out like they’d been waiting. “I’m—”

Her face folded. Not the tidy collapse of a line-break; something messier, a page crumpled from the center. She tried to breathe and produced a quiet animal noise, a soft bark that didn’t sound like her at all. The Binder’s cover flexed in sympathy and her whole body rebelled against that, some primal refusal to let a book echo her pain.

“Don’t,” she said to it, to them, to everything. Her eyes glittered, dry and furious. “Don’t breathe when I breathe.”

Harper set the Book down beside her knees and reached for Morgan’s wrists. The thread itched her palm. She didn’t care. “It’s just us,” she said. “Not witnesses. Not counts. Us.”

Morgan didn’t answer. The tremor became a shake became a quake. She pressed the heel of her hand into her sternum as if she could push the Binder through her back and into the dirt. “I can feel it,” she said thinly. “Every page. Like a choir holding a note. If I listen, it gets louder. If I don’t, it gets clever.”

Lila’s mouth went grim. “Clever how?”

“It finds ways in.” Morgan’s eyes flicked to the field, to the ridge, to the road. “That sign looks like a paragraph. The ditch looks like a footnote. Your thread looks like a line of text that wants to run.” Her laugh came out wrong. “I could annotate the sky.”

“And what would you write?” Harper asked, because sometimes naming helps.

Morgan’s breath hitched. “A warning,” she said. Then, softer, “A plea.”

She blinked twice and cried. It wasn’t cinematic. No gasp, no hand to face. Two perfect tears slid stubbornly out and then everything followed. Her shoulders came forward as if she were trying to wrap herself around a wound. The sound she made was ugly and correct.

Harper climbed up onto the stump without asking and wrapped her arms around Morgan from the front, foreheads close enough to share one patch of air. Lila rose, circled, and climbed up from behind, pressing into Morgan’s back so the three of them made a single human hinge with the Binder clamped safe between knees and ribcage.

The world shrank to body: heat, breath, the sharp citrus of Lila’s hair, the mineral smell of Harper’s sweat, the leather tang of the Binder. Morgan let go like a drop. She shook so hard the stump transmitted it to the ground.

“Say it,” Harper whispered. “Say the thing you don’t want to say.”

Morgan swallowed her pride and spoke into Harper’s collarbone. “I don’t want to be the one.”

Lila’s hands tightened. “You are not the only one. You’re the one right now.”

“I know.” Morgan’s voice tore. “I can do the math. I can do the miles. I can do the rules. But the part where it gets in—” She squeezed her eyes shut and said it fast, like it would hurt less sprinting. “I don’t know how to keep myself from becoming the book that carries me.”

Harper’s throat wrenched. “You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”